We've all been proposing skills and ideas, but I wanted to spend some time thinking through the ripple effects of ascension too. How do you see changes to training plans and other mechanical decisions?
Two big things on my mind are:
Reasonable stopping points:
Things like 3x Harness Power on a sorcerer or 3x Dodging on a warrior look less appealing to me than ever--they're useful, sure, but also long and painful grinds. Once I'm settled that 3x HP/Dodging will never happen, I stop at 2x.
On the flip side, skills like 101 Survival for bandit traps or 10 ranks of a mana control (enough to share with a capped 1x mana control character) seem more appealing to me than they used to. Less mechanically useful, sure, but there's something to be said for solid breakpoints at cheap TP costs that won't "delay" ATP gains for too long.
When to make the jump to ATPs:
For what post-cap has been without ascension, I think semis have been viewed (rightly or wrongly) as sort of a dream scenario, since eventually they can 2x CM, 2x Dodging, 2x spells, and 2x HP all at once. (Or, for ranger archers, Ambush instead of CM.)
That's still true for those who have been playing their post-cap semis for a while, but what of those fresh capping now or in the near future? Some semis might stop at fairly balanced builds where they don't 2x any of the above, while others might feel obligated to 2x at least a couple.
As for pures and squares (...well, at least warriors and monks), I'm wondering if they'll be the quickest to jump to ATPs at relatively fresh cap. I reviewed my monk's training plan and she's only going to need about 130k post-cap exp before I'll switch her over.
And how about diversification--will we see relatively fewer bolting empaths, for example, when 202 Spell Aiming represents 1,262,500 exp that could instead be going toward ATPs?
I'm very interested by how things will play out with training plan suggestions in the future!
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